Andrew Cresci, General Manager for NVIDIA talked with AECCafe’s Sanjay Gangal about NVIDIA’s news at Autodesk University 2011.
Sanjay: What brings you to this conference?
Andrew: AEC, Media and Entertainment and Manufacturing are the meat and potatoes of our business. We offer visualization and computation which makes this the perfect show for us.
Sanjay: Tell us about NVIDIA – how much has the company been involved in the CAD/CAM world?
Andrew: It’s the heart & soul of our business – 40% of our business. Autodesk is a big partner with huge volume. Historically, we’ve been providing high quality displays and visualization. More recently, we focused on simulation and rendering. We’re announcing Maximus technology. Because of the collapsing workflow, more people doing more workflow than ever before. People doing solid modeling and rendering multitasking and wanting to do these activities simultaneously. Maximus puts a huge GPU and graphics GPU into the same machine, and so you can keep running Autodesk Inventor or AutoCAD and can kick off 3D Studio Max rendering at the same time. People love this. If you’re running Inventor, it keeps running your analysis as you did before.
Sanjay: If someone says I need a graphics card for modeling or simulation, what’s the most powerful option?
Andrew: I would suggest the Maximus configuration, all the OEMS are shipping Maximus configurations, which is basically two GPUs in the system, one is for graphics and one for computing. Other than that you can ask for Quadro. We do some great Quadro cards all the way from Quadro 600 to 6,000. The cards have 6 GB memory. On the Tesla family of GPUs, there is the C2075, if you want to go down to the card level. Or use Maximus.
When Carl Bass was talking to the press, he spoke of Project Pandora. This is for the 3D Studio Max audience and allows you to render in the cloud. Users have wanted us to build a bigger machine for their rendering. When you click render in Pandora, instead of rendering locally it will render in the cloud. And it will shoot it off to the cloud. It can throw 32 GPUs at this. Something that would take a day and half I can get done in an hour. Pandora is in technology preview, and will release in an upcoming version of 3D Studio Max. It is a joint project with Autodesk.
Sanjay: How do people find out more about NVIDIA?
Andrew: Go to NVIDIA.com
